Review: Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century, by Andrew Talle

Abstract

Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century , by Andrew Talle. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xv, 343 pp. Andrew Talle delivers on the promise of this book's title. He provides a richly textured discussion of the roles music played in the everyday lives especially of young, affluent townspeople (and some nobles) in German-speaking Europe in Johann Sebastian Bach's day. His focus on keyboard instruments allows him to illuminate female as well as male performance, amateur as well as professional. Talle uses a variety of sources to reconstruct the way people used music to woo spouses, show off to guests, and pass the time. He discusses the acquisition of keyboard instruments, taking lessons, and domestic performance as tools used by the elites to demonstrate their distance from manual labor and the natural world: raw materials were crafted into sophisticated instruments that generated sound with the touch of a key, without having to be blown into, bowed, or held. The focus is on music made in well-appointed domestic interiors, especially from printed and manuscript Galanterien . Musical instruments and musical performance demonstrated knowledge, discipline, discernment, and worthy use of time. The early and middle chapters of Talle's book take the reader through the manufacture of instruments, the increasing popularity of keyboard music for amateurs in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and accounts of the roles music played in the lives of individual women and couples. Later chapters give male amateur and professional …